Nighttime is my time.
I firmly believe that the latter part of our 24-hour spin on Planet Earth is far superior to the former. I can picture the Moon sitting on a grossly grandiose throne of moonshine while the Sun bows down to its beauty and grace.
We don’t like the Sun. Not here.
But while the black sky and the pin-drop stillness of the after-hours is my comfort zone, its ability to climb down from up there, wherever it sleeps when the world is awake, sit right next to you and stare down into your soul can be a bit much sometimes.
Too much silence. Too much staring.
At night my thoughts, the tangled mess of the good, the bad, and the ugly, are the loudest. Naturally, there isn’t much to drown them out. The noise of life is missing, the tantrum of a parent, the robotic drone of an educator, the giddy chatter of a lover.
Being forced to come face to face with your thoughts, the ones you push away during the day to focus on things that require more attention like an assignment, the laundry, or a friend in need, can open the floodgates of anxiety. Processing emotions in a healthy way, one that enables us to look at a thought or an idea as a separate entity, a creation of our psychological being rather than the embodiment of it, keeps the peace up there, but it’s not always that simple.
More often than not I find myself lying awake, tired but unable to slip into the sweet nothingness of sleep because my brain is telling me that I need to finish tasks A, B, and C tomorrow-but also, I said something to Person X today morning and now they probably think I’m dim and what if I do nothing worthwhile with my life, what if Person Z is lying to me and I really wish I was anywhere but here and I really should fall asleep right now, I really shouldn’t wear that dress and just phew.
It’s a high-speed train and it’s making too much noise. But I can’t pull the chain on this one.
Now, I agree in a full capacity that a thought vomit in your head is the most natural reaction of your brain after it’s slogged all day. Add to the mix the unrealistic standards of social media, the nasty competition that’s turned our lives into marathons, and societal constructs of the desirable and the anti, and you have chaos at your hands.
But I know for a fact that almost every single one of us out there feels bitterly alone in this struggle. Like most of the demons we deal with internally, which we believe are entirely unique and completely unheard of, you and you and you, you all think you’re the only one.
This is fair because, in personal experience, the belief of this loneliness has helped me validate my negative thoughts, give them the space and the air they deserve so that they don’t become stale and start stinking up the rest of my mind.
The stress that comes with taking a negative whisper and transforming it into well, just a whisper, is as real as it gets. Some nights I feel it, the physical exhaustion of trying to keep the volume down up there. But you know they aren’t real, not really, and you can extinguish that flame before it turns into a raging fire. Of course, it’s easier said than done, but it can be done. We can turn noise into music.
This is why nighttime is still my time and will be till the end of my time.
You can’t convince me otherwise.
